Ars Poetica Archibald MacLeish

[shortstoryfan]

Hopefully some genius like JBI or some wiseman like Virgil will see this and be able to provide an answer.

"Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish has been used by teachers I've had several times to illustrate that "difficult" poetry is bad and all poetry should be relatively simple and accessible. The last two lines, "A poem should not mean/But be" has been quoted to me more times than I can remember. But looking now at the period of time MacLeish lived I wonder if that was his true intent, or if he meant that a poem shouldn't have to mean anything, as long as it is artful.

The only way I can think to make my question clear is to ask if MacLeish wanted poems to be realist or impressionist...if that makes sense.

[quasimodo1]

"The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading." Archibald MacLeish --------------------------- "Archibald MacLeish, who like Cummings arrived on the poetic scene after the first imagists had created the new movement, nevertheless can be credited with the poetic summing up of imagism in his 'Ars Poetica' in 1926, written well after the imagist decade had ended. It is inconceivable that such a poem could have been written without imagism, because the technique as well as the philosophy of MacLeish's most famous poem is imagist. It consists of a sequence of images that are discrete but that at the same time express and exemplify the imagist principles and practice of poetry." William Pratt

[shortstoryfan]

Hmm. Weird.